The days of low falutin’ food are numbered

Donnie Mac’s Trailer Park Cuisine, the flashy, trashy diner that lured patrons into Boise’s Linen District for late-night repasts of corndogs on sticks and frozen custard will close its doors Oct. 26.

John Rapp, Donnie Mac’s manager for the past two years, said Donnie MacKenzie, who opened the restaurant near the end of 2005, had not been with the business for about six months. Attempts to reach MacKenzie were unsuccessful.

The restaurant’s main investor, Colorado resident Jim Finch, could not be reached for comment.

“At midnight on Wednesday, we’ll close the doors forever,” Rapp said.

The restaurant, housed in a former Goodyear Tire store on West Grove Street, was part of a surge in commercial activity and building reuse in that part of the city that included the repurposing of the American Linen Supply Co. building as the Linen Building events center, the transformation of the Guest Lodge motel into the Modern Hotel and the addition of Big City Coffee.

The eatery motif may have been hick, but Donnie Mac’s was more forward-thinking than that, supporting the local food movement and purchasing meat from the Homestead Natural Foods ranchers’ co-op.

“In terms of the restaurant industry, they had a pretty long run,” said James Patrick Kelly, a local teacher and food writer who worked in restaurants for 20 years.

The Grove Street diner had gained its fans, Kelly noted.

“They had a pretty ardent following,” he said. “My kids loved going there. They’re going to be disappointed.”

The restaurant’s patio, popular in the warmer months, became a liability during the winters, never more so than during the economic downturn, Rapp said.

“It’s a struggle in the restaurant industry,” he said. “The patio triples our business, and we struggled in the winter months to keep afloat. It’s just been a struggle, and in this economic climate, there’s not much else we can do. It had come to a point where this is the most fiscally responsible decision, to close the doors.

“We’ll all be all right. It’s kind of sucky to get a week’s notice. But you know, what can you do? This is a business.”

Patio space can be tricky for Boise restaurants, said John Berryhill, who’s owned five restaurants, all with patios, since 1998.

“It’s important to have a patio, and it’s important to have a good patio, but a good patio for one place is not a good patio in another place,” Berryhill said. “He did have a significant-sized patio, as I do. But your business model can’t rely on your patio in this climate.

“We think this is a patio town, but the bigger your patio is, the fewer people are sitting inside.”